I. Field
The following description relates generally to wireless communications, and more particularly to handoff between access points or base stations in wireless communications.
II. Background
Wireless communication systems are widely deployed to provide various types of communication; for instance, voice and/or data may be provided via such wireless communication systems. A typical wireless communication system, or network, can provide multiple users access to one or more shared resources. For instance, a system may use a variety of multiple access techniques such as Frequency Division Multiplexing (FDM), Time Division Multiplexing (TDM), Code Division Multiplexing (CDM), and others.
Common wireless communication systems employ one or more base stations that provide a coverage area. A typical base station can transmit multiple data streams for broadcast, multicast and/or unicast services, wherein a data stream may be a stream of data that can be of independent reception interest to a wireless terminal. A wireless terminal within the coverage area of such base station can be employed to receive one, more than one, or all the data streams carried by the composite stream. Likewise, a wireless terminal can transmit data to the base station or another wireless terminal.
Handoffs between base stations and/or base station sectors commonly occur within wireless communication systems. For instance, handoffs may be mobile-directed such that upon detecting a signal with a signal quality (e.g., signal to noise ratio (SNR)) above a threshold from a disparate sector differing from a sector to which the wireless terminal is currently connected, the wireless terminal may attempt to access the disparate sector. Oftentimes, make before break handoffs may be utilized such that a link to the current sector may be broken prior to accessing the disparate, detected sector. Further, access to a sector may be contention-based where two or more wireless terminals may transmit access requests to the sector at a substantially similar time over a shared resource (e.g., channel); thus, by employing contention-based techniques, handoffs within typical wireless communication systems may encounter significant time delays. Moreover, wireless terminals that perform conventional handoffs within a multicarrier setting where different sectors may be associated with disparate carriers may probe for other sectors and/or carriers for handing off to by way of retuning, which may cause loss of a current connection.